Secrets of the World’s 38 Species of Wild Cats

Posted by David Maxwell Braun of National Geographic in Cat Watch

December 24, 2015

The little known Pallas’s Cat. This species is typically a shade of light to dark grey but red variants occur, especially in Central Asia. ©Emmanuel Keller, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

 

Perhaps the most popular pet on Earth, the family cat is a beloved member of countless households. Millions of others abandoned or strayed are flourishing independently outdoors, where they may pose serious threats to birds and other small animals. But as familiar as the house cat is, not many people know it has 38 truly wild relatives, distinct species that include not only the iconic “King of the Jungle,” the lion, and  the world’s largest predator, the tiger, but also obscure felids like the flat-headed cat, fishing cat, and oncilla. Wild cats mostly live in exotic places most of us will never visit, but several species survive, often covertly, within or around villages and cities in many parts of the world (Famous Cougar That Was Holed Up Under L.A House Returns to the Wild).

“Wild Cats of the World,” by Luke Hunter; illustrations by Priscilla Barrett. Published by Bloomsbury Natural History, 2015. Click the cover for more information.

Cat enthusiasts — and anyone who appreciates wildlife and the wonders of evolution — will be enchanted by a comprehensive new book that shares the secrets of the felids. Written by President and Chief Conservation Officer of Panthera, Luke Hunter, Wild Cats of the World profiles all 38 known species, illustrated with 400 photographs of the astonishing variety and beauty of this ancient and widespread family of carnivores.

Hunter, a committee member of the National Geographic Big Cats Initiative, published the book to illuminate and teach everyone of all ages about the diversity of the cats and explain the importance of their conservation, and how saving them can be beneficial to us.
Felids live in virtually any habitat, from desert to the subarctic, Hunter said in an email interview with Cat Watch. They have been around for about 30 million years and have out-lived many other branches in carnivore evolution which died out in their wake.

So what makes cats such successful species?

“The cat is the ultimate solo hunter.”

LH: Their success is due, in part, to their extremely efficient body design. The cat is the ultimate solo hunter, with acute senses, hair-trigger reflexes, explosive muscular strength and a supple skeleton. Protractile claws and elastic wrists give tremendous control for grasping and handling large prey, while truncated, powerful jaws deliver a precise killing bite. Social carnivores like canids and hyaenas have more robust, less flexible bodies built for stamina to tire prey over long distances but which lack the cat’s solitary killing prowess. All of which means, for example, that a lone puma is able to take down an adult elk but it takes a few wolves to do likewise.”

Cheetahs are poorly built for arboreality but they easily scale large sloping trunks, sometimes as high as five to six metres. Cheetahs value trees as communal signposts for scent-marking, and for scanning the horizon for prey. © Nick Garbutt, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Yet the future of wild cats is in doubt almost everywhere. What are some of the greatest threats and where might cats have the best chance of survival?

LH: Sadly, all the reasons that cats are declining arise from people, especially the conversion of wild habitats into farmland, pasture and cities, and the loss of their prey species. Aside from these ‘indirect threats’, cats are specifically targeted by people for a variety of reasons. Many species are killed by herders and farmers around the world, fearing for their livestock; the recent poisoning of lions in Kenya’s famous Maasai Mara Reserve by Masai herders is, unfortunately repeated every day somewhere in the world.

“All the reasons that cats are declining arise from people.”

Finally, cats are illegally killed–poached–for their fur and body parts. The demand driven by traditional Asian medicinal beliefs for tiger body parts (which have as much medicinal value as consuming a cow) is now so intense that tigers are hunted inside protected reserves across their range. Increasingly, other large cat species–lions, leopards and even jaguars–are being killed for the same trade.

North America’s most widespread felid, the bobcat can be richly spotted with large blotches as in this female and her four-month old kittens in California. Contrary to popular myth, this is not the result of hybridisation with the ocelot. © Barry Rowan, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Of all the cats, which ones are the most obscure, the least known, and therefore most surprising?
LH: Many smaller cat species have never been the focus of an in-depth field study, and a number are yet to have even a single individual fitted with a radio-collar–one of the standard, most useful tools of wildlife research–among them the bay cat, Chinese mountain cat and flat-headed Cat.

Fortunately, I am starting to see more interest in the small cats. The Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund does a marvelous job of supporting work on small felids, and a board trustee of Panthera, Bob Quartermain, helped establish the Small Cat Action Fund. As a result of these efforts, we have been able to begin the first comprehensive studies on some very little-known species including two long-term studies on the African golden cat, as well as help local conservationists launch new projects to reduce threats to endangered species such as the fishing cat and the Sunda clouded leopard.

The South American Pampas cat occurs in a wide variety of open habitats where it is vulnerable to predators- especially domestic dogs- on open ground so it rarely ventures far from shelter such as dense grass, scrub or rocky areas. La Pampa province, central Argentina. © Sebastian Kennerknect, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Do you have a favorite species of wild cat?

“If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the lion.”

LH: If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the Lion. It is such a formidable animal, there is nothing quite comparable to watching a pride of lionesses walking across an African plain as they set out on the hunt; except for healthy adult male elephants, virtually anything is fair game to a large pride. And their sociality is unique. The fact that lions are the only cats to live in large extended family groups makes them a terrific subject for understanding the evolutionary forces that shape cat behaviour and ecology.

And of course, despite its high visibility in some African parks and reserves, the lion is increasingly endangered. A blue-ribbon team of many lion specialists led by Hans Bauer at Oxford University’s WildCru recently analyzed population data from 47 lion populations in Africa and found that the species is now declining in most regions of Africa except a handful of countries in southern Africa.

An Asiatic Lioness and cubs in the Gir Forest, India. Persecution and trophy hunting had reduced this population to around 25 individuals by the start of the 20th Century. Strict protection imposed in the early 1900s has resulted in a spectacular population rebound where now the challenge is a lack of habitat for further expansion. © Patrick Meier, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

What are the major research questions we need to resolve to understand/conserve wild cats?

LH: Most species of cats are very poorly studied and we urgently need to know the basics; where they live, whether numbers are declining and what threats they are facing.

The world’s smallest cat (by weight), the rusty-spotted cat, Ranthambore National Park, India. © Santosh Saligram, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Even for a relatively familiar species such as the snow leopard, we are certain they occur in only 40 percent of their estimated range. In other words, 60 percent of the species’ range map entails areas where we have no recent survey data confirming their presence. It is very difficult to effectively conserve a species if we are not certain whether or not they even occur in a site!

Another great mystery in cat ecology is what happens during dispersal, when sub-adult cats (typically) leave their mother’s home range to seek their own range. It’s a critical period in the life of a cat when many individuals do not make it, especially as dispersal increasingly takes cats into human-dominated landscapes.

We need a much greater understanding of how cats can move through such anthropogenic habitats and how to foster safe passage, for example, by maintaining wooded corridors or building underpasses for cats to safely navigate dangerous highway crossings.

Relative to its size, the serval has the largest ears of any felid. When resting relaxed, as in this adult female in Kenya, the ears almost meet in the middle of the head. © vNina Siemiatkowski, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

What would the world be like without wild cats?

LH: It would be a bleak world indeed. African savannah would be a tame, sad place without the sound of lions roaring at night. Many of the world’s ecosystems have lost one or more of the cat species that historically lived there, and all of them are less intact, less wild in some way.

“Reintroducing cougars…would be overwhelmingly beneficial for people.”

Aside from the terrible loss in conservation terms, that can have practical, costly implications for people. Where I live, in the northeast U.S., Anglo-Europeans quickly got rid of cougars and most other large carnivores soon after they settled here, which (in part) has produced a massive over-population of their main prey species, the white-tailed deer. A team at the University of Alaska recently calculated the consequences of reintroducing cougars into the northeast and found it would be overwhelmingly beneficial for people–that’s right, beneficial. Their models showed that, within 50 years of successful establishment, cougars would likely reduce deer densities and thus vehicle collisions with deers by 22 percent resulting in 53,000 prevented human injuries, 384 prevented human fatalities, and $4.41 billion in avoided costs.

There are very few observations of fishing cats hunting in the wild. Much of their behavior is inferred from captives in naturalistic enclosures with opportunities to forage, such as this individual in Singapore Zoo. © Nick Garbutt, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Where are the best places to see wild cats?

LH: There is nowhere like iconic African savannah woodlands to see wild cats, and few places can compete with famous African game reserves like Etosha National Park (Namibia), Hwange National Park, (Zimbabwe), Kafue National Park (Zambia) and the Serengeti-Mara complex (Kenya-Tanzania).
To see less visible cat species requires more effort, but there are amazing opportunities these days that simply were not possible a decade or so ago. The Porto Jofre region on the Cuiaba River in Brazil’s Pantanal during the dry season (August-October) now promises almost guaranteed sightings of wild jaguars, as well as a chance to see ocelots and pumas.
India’s Hemis National Park and surrounding valleys are the only places I know where there is a reasonable chance of seeing snow leopards in the wild, but only in the winter when wildlife moves down into the valleys.
It is now possible to spot even the most endangered cat on earth, the Iberian Lynx; Spain’s Sierra Morena mountains and Doñana National Park have well-protected populations where the lynx have become fairly used to tourists.

Pages from “Wild Cats of the World” show illustrations many wild species of felids. Enlarge the image by clicking on it. Pages courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

What special attributes are there that cats have that would delight and surprise us?

“The cat family…might have more members than we currently know.”

LH: Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the cat family is that it might have more members than we currently know. During the writing of this book, geneticists at Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul discovered that the species we had long called the Oncilla was actually two, separate species, the northern oncilla and southern oncilla. Even though they look very similar, molecular analysis shows they are genetically distinct and largely reproductively isolated.

As ever more sophisticated analyses are performed, I am sure more such “cryptic species” hiding in plain sight will be revealed and the book includes a preview of some of the likely forthcoming changes.

The African wildcat, progenitor of the familiar housecat. African wildcats in northern Africa and the Middle East often have very pale sandy colouration with cinnamon coloured markings, as this individual photographed in the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve, central Chad. © Tim Wacher, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

How can wild cats help us conserve nature?

LH: Because they often sit on the top of complicated trophic systems–food webs–large cats can be particularly effective umbrellas for biodiversity conservation. Cats require large tracts of mostly intact, wild habitat so the conservation of a population of lions, tigers or leopards boils down to effectively protecting those landscapes, and thus all the other species that rely on them.

A forthcoming paper published by Panthera scientists demonstrates this effect in the jaguar. The Jaguar Corridor–a network of protected areas and human-dominated landscapes connecting them–turns out to be very effective in also conserving a large number of co-occurring species, especially mammals.

Conserving cats = conserving millions of other species.

As I explain in the book, if we succeed in conserving robust populations of cats, we also succeed in conserving literally millions of other species and the intact, healthy ecosystems that are absolutely vital to all life–including people.

See more about Luke Hunter’s 2015 book: Wild Cats of the World.

So-called solitary cats are far more socially elastic than often portrayed. Here, two adult male leopards consort with a female (foreground) in oestrous, Sabi Sand Game Reserve, South Africa. The two males are almost certainly territorial neighbours and “dear enemies”–rivals who know each other and who chose to be tolerant when the costs of fighting are high for both. © James Tyrrell, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Wild Cats of the World: The Full List of Species

Chinese Mountain Cat, Felis bieti; Wildcat, Felis libyca/silvertris/ornata/catus; Black-footed Cat, Felis nigripes; Sand Cat, Felis margarita; Jungle Cat, Felis chaus; Pallas’s Cat, Otocolobus manul; Leopard Cat, Prionailurus bengalensis; Flat-headed Cat, Prionailurus planiceps; Rusty-spotted Cat, Prionailurus rubiginosus; Fishing Cat, Prionailurus viverrinus; Marbled Cat, Pardofelis marmorata; Bay Cat, Catopuma badia; Asian Golden Cat, Catopuma temminckii; Serval, Leptailurus serval; Caracal, Caracal caracal; African Golden Cat, Profelis aurata; Geoffroy’s Cat, Leopardus geoffroyi; Oncillas Leopardus tigrinus and Leopardus guttulus; Margay Leopardus wiedii; Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis; Guiña, Leopardus guigna; Colocolo, Leopardus colocolo; Andean Cat, Oreailurus jacobita; Eurasian Lynx, Lynx lynx; Spanish Lynx, Lynx pardinus; Bobcat, Lynx rufus; Canada Lynx, Lynx canadensis; Jaguarundi, Herpailurus yagouaroundi; Puma, Puma concolor; Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus; Snow Leopard, Uncia uncia; Clouded leopards, Neofelis nebulosa and Neofelis diardi; Tiger, Panthera tigris; Lion, Panthera leo; Leopard, Panthera pardus; Jaguar, Panthera once.

Luke Hunter is the President and Chief Conservation Officer of Panthera. Before joining Panthera, Hunter worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society as the head of their Great Cats Program and he taught wildlife ecology at universities in Australia and South Africa. 

Luke Hunter, Panthera, Naybandan Wildlife Reserve, Iran. Photo credit: Frans Lanting/Panthera.

At Panthera, he is especially focused on developing and scaling up solutions to widespread retaliatory killing of big cats by rural communities, and on improving the protection of wild cat habitat. He also works on reducing the impacts of legal recreational hunting on leopard and lion populations in Africa; in the Brazilian Pantanal to reduce the conflict between ranchers and jaguars; and in Iran on Persian leopards and the last surviving Asiatic cheetahs. 

He has written extensively about wild cats and their conservation, publishing widely in both scientific journals and popular media, including for Slate, The Huffington Post and National Geographic. He has published seven books including Cheetah (2003), Cats of Africa: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (2006) and Field Guide to Carnivores of the World (2011), which has been translated into Chinese, French and German editions. 

Follow Luke Hunter on Twitter.

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